Peter Hain's lead on the switch to Alternative Vote
In March 2004 Make Votes Count, the umbrella campaign group for electoral reform, gave Peter Hain, Leader of the House of Commons, a platform to argue that a switch from first-past-the-post to the Alternative Vote in elections to Parliament would "re-engage the public with the democratic process".
In his speech at the House of Commons, Hain – who was the minister in charge of parliamentary reform – analysed the failings of first-past-the-post, arguing that the current led to wasted votes in many areas and contributed to the political exclusion of poorer people (for full speech, see www.makevotescount.org.uk).
The Alternative Vote (AV)
AV is similar to first-past-the-post in that one candidate is elected in each constituency. However, instead of a single vote, voters can list candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins an overall majority on the first vote, candidates with the fewest votes are progressively eliminated and the next preferences of their ballots are distributed among the remaining candidates until one secures a majority (over 50% per cent of the vote).
AV is thus a majoritarian system with a limited preferential scope. Its major disadvantage is that it is not at all proportional and can be even more disproportional than first-past-the-post (see below).
AV is however valuable where only one office-holder is being elected as it ensures that the candidate finally elected has an overall majority and does not win power only on the largest minority vote. A variant of AV, known as the Supplementary Vote, is used for the elections for the London mayor; and either AV or SV could be used to advantage in the US Presidential elections where a single minor candidate or more can rob one of the two main candidates of electoral victory by splitting the vote. |
Hain gave four reasons for switching to the Alternative Vote (AV):
- AV allows people to vote "positively rather than negatively", because they can rank candidates in order of preference;
- With fewer wasted votes, people have more motivation to vote;
- Every elected candidate will gain a seat on more than 50% of the vote in the constituency;
- Most importantly for Hain, AV retains single-member constituencies of the same size as now, maintaining "the link between the MP and a community or communities of reasonable size".
Hain's focus was very much on the growth and influence of the tactical voting between Labour and Lib Dem voters that has swelled Labour's majorities in recent elections and returned more Lib Dem MPs to Parliament. He argues that voters are forced to vote for their second choice when they vote tactically whereas under AV they could vote for their first choice and still have a second and further option. He also fears that tactical voting is an unsound process and his party could be "untactically voted out" of power.
But he also makes both a pragmatic and idealistic claim for a switch to the system for which he has long been an advocate. Pragmatically, he argues, AV is the only viable option for change. A switch to PR would unseat many sitting MPs and these parliamentary turkeys would not vote for this kind of Christmas. (Whether British citizens are happy to be represented by turkeys is an open question.)
Idealistically, or "crucially", as he says, Hain argues that AV will
| Give voters a greater sense of influence and ownership over the political process. This is the key, a politics that is owned by the people, not the politicians. |
The problem with Hain's idealistic claim is that AV does not give voters "ownership" of politics but strengthens the power of existing parties over the political process and elected office. Crucially, as stated below, it is far from proportional and thus robs the electorate of an accurate representation of their votes in Parliament – the very keystone of genuine representative democracy.
| For the 1997 general election in the UK, Democratic Audit computed the number of seats the parties would have won under a variety of alternative electoral systems, including AV. Democratic Audit Paper No. 11, Making Votes Count, by Patrick Dunleavy, Helen Margetts, Brendan O'Duffy and Stuart Weir (Human Rights Centre, University of Essex, 1997) explains the methodology of the complex simulation exercise that was undertaken and sets out the results in full. |
| To read this report, click here >> |
[Size 352kb/pdf] |
Here we compare the results under AV with those under first-past-the post, a PR system (the Mixed Member System) and a preferential system (Single Transferable Vote) :-
The Alternative Vote would have produced an even more disproportional result in 1997 than first-past-the-post did, with a very high deviation score of 23.5% – which means that more than one in five seats in the House of Commons would have been misallocated (or more bluntly, that one in five MPs would have been there wrongfully). Labour's unearned landslide victory would have swelled even more from 179 to 213 seats and the Conservatives would have been utterly eclipsed, with only 11o seats).
The experience of the use of Alternative Vote in elections to the House of Representatives in Australia since 1918 has amply confirmed that AV is disproportional in practice. In the 2001 elections, the Liberal-National coalition won over 54% per cent of the seats in the House on 43% of the vote while the Australian Labor Party received 43% of the seats on 37.8% of the vote. Their over-representation was at the expense of four other parties, including the Greens and Pauline Hanson's One Nation, which won no seats after sharing over 14% of the vote. (The position in these elections is complicated by the degree to which the larger parties manipulate the compulsory preferential voting to discriminate against the smaller parties.)
Overall, the figures for deviation from proportionality, using the Gallagher Index, stand at 8.5% for the period from 1949 to 1983 and at over 10% for the period from 1984 (when the size of the House was increased) to 2001. The increase in disproportionality reflects the growing number of parties putting up candidates, as in 2001. But in a forthcoming book, David Farrell and Ian McAllister also note a historic and systematic bias in favour of the Liberal Party in nine elections going back to 1949, in which the Liberals won more seats than Labor despite having won fewer votes.
It is hard to assess how far AV in Australia has created or obstructed pluralist politics, or Hain's voter "ownership", since compulsory voting there plainly contributes to the high levels of party discipline and partisan politics. Be that is it may, the use of AV also contributes to the strength of the party machines and the strict party cohesion in the House, where dissent is almost unknown. As Farrell and McAllister note, the parties' elected representatives are "strongly partisan" and "highly disciplined" within the House. It also contributes to the exclusion of smaller parties from representation in the House and is thus anti-pluralist in its effects.
There are at least safeguards in Australia against a House of Representatives, unrepresentative of the electorate, giving too much power to the government that results. First, Australia has a second chamber, the Senate, which is elected under a more proportional system, STV; secondly, Australia is a federal state and the states have their own legislatures and governments which act as counter-weights to central government; and thirdly, Australia has a constitution. None of these safeguards exist in the UK; the danger is thus that a House of Commons, even more unrepresentative than a House elected under FPTP, will remain virtually all-powerful and unchecked by constitutional safeguards.
It is clear why many Labour MPs prefer AV to PR alternatives. Not only would the system preserve their seats and the political status-quo. It would also be the Labour's party's political advantage and assist in maintaining it current political hegemony. Moreover, it would also benefit the Liberal Democrats by institutionalising tactical voting. The Labour and Lib Dem hierarchies were tempted by a mutually advantageous deal over AV in advance of the 1997 election. It could have given them, and not the people, "ownership" of British politics at least for a generation.
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